Closing America for renovations

 



A radical approach, suggested by Amotz Asa-El of The Jerusalem Post, for America to regain its prominence: Close for renovations.

THE DIPLOMATIC cost of all this is exorbitant. Governments across the world are losing respect for the US. Turkey, which once didn't lift a finger without America's approval, is openly waltzing into the sunset with Syria and Iran. Iran has made a mockery of Obama's dialogue gesture. China has made a joke of Obama personally, when it censored his very plea that Beijing ease censorship. Saudi Arabia has ignored Washington's pleas to deliver a peace gesture. And finally, in a natural extension of all this accelerating disparagement, Hugo Chavez publicly backed Iran's nuclear adventurism with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alongside him in Venezuela - a three-hour flight from Miami.
All of them, from Chavez to Kim, are humiliating America because they have concluded that the decade that began with the 9/11 attacks and later saw a meltdown in Wall Street and now a military entanglement in Afghanistan is about to end with America as dwarfed as Russia was last decade.
Where, then, is all this leading?
Eventually, when the deficit and the dollar sink even deeper while unemployment and interest rates rise that much higher, Americans will understand that action must be painful, swift and immediate. That is when, with or without Obama, they will set the world aside and focus on nothing but economic rehabilitation. The US will cut defense spending deeply, possibly retrieving the entire mini-armies it has in Japan and Germany. Afghanistan, like Iraq and Vietnam before it, will be quit, and all foreign aid programs will be discontinued.
A neo-isolationist Washington will effectively tell the world to try to run its affairs alone, just for several years, during which the US will be geopolitically closed for economic renovations. Then, with defense spending and foreign aid slashed, other budgets will follow suit. The deficit will then be narrowed, the dollar will resurrect, bond yields will drop, investments will soar, new jobs will appear, the US economy will flourish and dictators the world over, when told anything by an American leader, will respond with respect.